1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image communicating apparatus such as a facsimile apparatus, and more particularly an image communicating apparatus equipped with an ink jet printer provided with plural ink discharge openings.
2. Related Background Art
There has recently been developed an ink jet printer for recording characters or an image by discharging ink from discharge openings or orifices on to a recording material, utilizing bubbles generated by thermal energy. Because the heat generating member (heater) provided in each discharge opening is significantly smaller than the piezoelectric element employed in the conventional ink jet printers, this ink jet printer enables a high-density arrangement of multiple discharge openings, thereby providing a recorded image of high quality. In addition it has additional advantages such as high speed and low noise.
On the other hand, the facsimile apparatus are required not only to transmit the image at a high speed, but also to receive an image with a high image quality and a high speed. In consideration of the above-mentioned features, the ink jet printer of the method discharging the ink toward the recording material utilizing the bubbles generated by thermal energy is considered as one of the printers capable of meeting such requirements.
In such ink jet printer, the ink discharge openings of the recording head may be clogged by the ink which is viscosified by a pause in the use of the recording head, or in a low humidity situation or by a difference in the frequency of use, or by the deposition of dust. For this reason there has been employed a discharge recovery mechanism for removing such viscosified ink by pressurizing the discharge openings from the interior of the recording head, or by sucking said ink from a protective cap for covering the discharge openings of the recording head. Also when the recording head is not in use, the discharge openings thereof are covered with a cap to prevent the failure in ink discharge.
However, despite such countermeasures, the ink discharge openings may still become clogged in case of a prolonged pause in the use of the recording head or under a relatively dry ambient condition, because the ink path communicating with each ink discharge opening is extremely narrow. Also ink discharge openings used very infrequently in a recording operation may be clogged in a next recording operation. Such clogging results in white streaks or stripes on the recorded image, thus deteriorating the quality thereof and causing lack of information to be recorded. Consequently, the operator has conventionally checked the discharge failure by visual observation of the state of the recorded image, and has manually instructed the above-explained recovery operations in case discharge failure is identified in some discharge openings.
However, in realizing a facsimile apparatus equipped with such an ink jet printer, such manual inspection of or instruction for the discharge failure is extremely inconvenient for a facsimile apparatus because a received image signal has to be wasted, and there will result a drawback that the resending of the image signal has to be requested manually, for example by a photocall after the signal reception is completed. Also the necessity for such inspection for discharge failures may be forgotten or a request for signal resending may not possible due to the office hours of the sender.